In the film ‘Amelie’, there is a very funny segment that may have been inspired by a website on the internet…
In the film, we’re led to believe that her father refuses to leave his home for any reason. In his garden there is a garden gnome. Amelie makes arrangements with a flight attendant to have this gnome accompany her on flights around the world. Pictures keep arriving in his mail of the gnome in front of some of the world’s most famous landmarks. It reminded me that I once heard there was a website on the internet that featured digital photos of a garden gnome taken all around the world as it accompanied one traveler on his many trips, and also photographed at familiar landmarks like the Taj Mahal. There is even a TV commercial that has a gnome dispelling travel myths. The idea of a travelling gnome seems to have been firmly entrenched in our popular culture.
My next door neighbour has a few garden gnomes on the property. One has a fishing line that dangles just above their backyard pool. But every year at this time, as the night air turns chilly, the gnomes disappear…I know for a fact that my neighbour puts them away for the winter, but after seeing Amelie, I’d like to believe that maybe some of these comical garden statues pack up their meager belongings and take flight for warmer climes, only to return in the Spring.
My wife and I have some small garden statuary that will need to be put away before the snow flies.We have a fairly large rabbit that peers over the stone stump of a tree that also serves as a bench to rest on. There is another that I bought my wife for Mother’s day some years back. It’s quite a large piece that is carved from stone. It portrays an angel kneeling and seems to be offering protection to a few small creatures that have come up to her. Out of all the small statues that are hidden amongst the flowers and bushes, this is the one that I brush off and bring in to the house to a special place reserved for it in our living room.
In my radio show tonight, I talk about a cat languishing in the garden. If you watch a cat as the animal stalks a butterfly on the wing, it is almost like seeing an animated garden ornament rise from its resting place. Watch it closely as it makes its stealthy approach through flowers, pausing occasionally, as if to enhance the effect of a statue in motion. After a time, the animal returns to its place in the sun, as the butterfly floats away on a breeze. The writer in the book “The Literary Garden - Bringing Fiction’s Best Gardens To Life“, a Berkley book published in 2001, suggests that a living creature creates a more stunning tableau against the backdrop of our garden than any gnome could.
Rather than be content with the simple beauty of nature, we sometimes like to enhance our surroundings with garden statuary. Some of it is to elicit a smile, like the garden gnome. And then there are others. like the angel statue, that give us reason to wonder about the mystery of nature, and maybe a glimpse of an unseen world that is all around us.
I thought this poem appropriate for tonight’s show…
Sara Teasdale wrote, “There will be stars over the place forever; / Though the house we loved and the street we loved are lost, / Every time the earth circles her orbit / On the night the Autumn Equinox is crossed, / Two stars we know, poised on the peak of midnight / Will reach their zenith; stillness will be deep; / There will be stars over the place forever, / There will be stars forever, while we sleep.”
Maybe there is an unseen presence in the garden…
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Don Jackson
<strong>Jessie…</strong>
- JessieMan i just love your blog, keep the cool posts comin…..